News

RES journals to implement new replication policy

Published Date: 05 December 2017

That the results of research papers can be easily replicated is commonly regarded as being of central importance and as an integral and essential part of any and all scientific investigation. In 2018, both of the Society’s journals – The Economic Journal (EJ) and The Econometrics Journal (EctJ) – will be implementing a new replication check for empirical and experimental papers. This follows a successful pilot that EctJ has been running since August 2017.

The new policy introduces rigorous checks of the replication packages for accepted papers before publication. These checks focus on verifying that the packages are well documented, can be run with some reasonable effort on typical academic computing platforms and replicate the reported results.

The checks limit the publication of glaring mistakes by forcing authors to double check their data, code and results before publication. They also ensure that empirical and computational results are replicable and that proposed methods can easily be used, thus increasing the credibility and usefulness of the journals.

Note that the journals’ editors do not intend to check for robustness, whether methods are appropriate, etc. Rather, they will simply check whether the submitted software and data are consistent with the results reported in the papers.

Current debates on the replicability of scientific research suggest that many replication packages do not deliver and that the ‘market’ is unlikely to sort this out by dutifully replicating published papers. The Society believes that the EJ and EctJ should become leaders in assuring replicability of scientific research in economics.

Career/Education

The Royal Economic Society is one of the oldest and most prestigious economic associations in the world. It is a learned society, founded in 1890 to promote the study of economic science in academic life, government service, business, industry and public affairs. The Society has approximately 3,000 members, of whom 60% live outside the United Kingdom.